Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table

Summary (from the publisher): The acclaimed author of A Replacement Life shifts between heartbreak and humor in this gorgeously told, recipe-filled memoir. A family story, an immigrant story, a love story, and an epic meal, Savage Feast explores the challenges of navigating two cultures from an unusual angle.

A revealing personal story and family memoir told through meals and recipes, Savage Feast begins with Boris’s childhood in Soviet Belarus, where good food was often worth more than money. He describes the unlikely dish that brought his parents together and how years of Holocaust hunger left his grandmother so obsessed with bread that she always kept five loaves on hand. She was the stove magician and Boris’ grandfather the master black marketer who supplied her, evading at least one firing squad on the way. These spoils kept Boris’ family—Jews who lived under threat of discrimination and violence—provided-for and protected.

Despite its abundance, food becomes even more important in America, which Boris’ family reaches after an emigration through Vienna and Rome filled with marvel, despair, and bratwurst. How to remain connected to one’s roots while shedding their trauma? The ambrosial cooking of Oksana, Boris’s grandfather’s Ukrainian home aide, begins to show him the way. His quest takes him to a farm in the Hudson River Valley, the kitchen of a Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a Native American reservation in South Dakota, and back to Oksana’s kitchen in Brooklyn. His relationships with women—troubled, he realizes, for reasons that go back many generations—unfold concurrently, finally bringing him, after many misadventures, to an American soulmate.

Savage Feast is Boris’ tribute to food, that secret passage to an intimate conversation about identity, belonging, family, displacement, and love. 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book from HarperCollins. 

A family memoir centered by food and recipes, Savage Feast tells the author's story from his childhood in Soviet Belarus through emigration through Vienna and Rome to a new start in Brooklyn. For Boris, food and sharing meals with his family become a way to maintain his roots even as he feels pulled towards his new American life. Additionally, when Boris feels adrift, he turns to cooking and exploring in the kitchen as a way to work out his next step. This book takes Boris on journeys cooking with his grandfather's Ukrainian home aid to the kitchen of  Russian restaurant on the Lower East Side to a children's camp on a Native American reservation in South Dakota. 

With food as its grounding force, this memoir explores the author's experiences as an immigrant to America, whose family culture is still very much rooted in Russia. As an only child who immigrated with his parents and grandparents, Boris faces a lot of familial pressure to live a certain way while also trying to follow his dreams of writing and embracing his new home in America. I did like how he incorporated cooking, eating, and also the process of obtaining food throughout the narrative. For example, one of the first stories shared once his family reaches America is about his father trying to go buy groceries for the first time and disappearing for two hours: "'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I lost my mind.' He had gone only a block. The supermarket door had slid open by itself, whereupon he nearly toppled the tiny old Austrian woman coming out" (70). My favorite chapters were the ones that dealt with Oksana, Boris's grandfather's Ukrainian home aide, who is an experienced cook. The description of her relationship with the family, as well as the dishes she prepared, were especially vivid. Oksana herself felt somehow more fleshed out than Boris's family, most of which I didn't get a clear sense of who they were or what they were like, with the exception of his grandfather.

There was a disjointed quality to the structure of this memoir. Each chapter seemed to jump ahead in time and it was sometimes hard to pick up the thread of Boris's story and what had happened since the conclusion of the previous chapter. For instance, the book skips over the family getting settled in America, his grandmother's decline in health, and Boris's college experience. The placement of the recipes sometimes felt abrupt (perhaps this was due to this being a proof copy?) and were dropped at random throughout each relevant chapter. It seems like it would have been more orderly to arrange these either at the opening or closing of the appropriate chapter, or waiting to share them all together at the conclusion of the book. In addition, there is one chapter that details Boris's grandfather meeting Oksana for the first time. They are alone for the duration of the chapter, yet their initial conversations are quoted extensively, which didn't read like a memoir but more like a fictional account of their meeting. Not only did it feel very different from the rest of the book, which is from Boris's point of view, but it also felt almost like a standalone short story that somehow got inserted into a middle of a memoir. I did love this chapter, but it just didn't flow super well with the rest of the book.

Ultimately, this memoir is the author's tribute to food and shared experiences of meals with those closest to him as he navigates questions of identity, belonging, family, and love. I appreciated the focus on food and the inclusion of menus, but ultimately I didn't enjoy reading this as much as I had hoped and found the editing lacking. 

Stars: 3